1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an apparatus for creating an animation program and a method for creating the same and, more particularly, to an animation program creating apparatus for creating an animation program for use with the step of manufacturing an animation program to be frequently employed with game machines and with a variety of presentations or other actions, and a method for creating the same.
2. Description of the Related Art
So far, development has been made of animation programs for a variety of games running on arcade game machines, home game machines, personal computers and so on. Such animation programs are employed with programs for games, referred to generally as "game software", and the actions of the animation programs in the game software are the significant element that can be enjoyed by people ranging from young people to grownup people.
The animation programs in such game software are constructed in such a manner that, for example, characters such as people and animals, background images and so on are displayed on a display screen and that their actions are controlled by an instruction from an operation input device such as a control button or a joystick device. Therefore, users can interactively proceed with the games by entering the control information from an operation button, a mouse as a pointing device or an operation input device such as a joystick device or a keyboard, while viewing the images displayed by the game software, such as the characters, background images and so on, on the display screen.
Such game software is developed generally by cooperative work of many people, such as game creators who are planning the scenario of a game, designers creating characters, background images and so on to be employed in the game, people creating music and sounds such as sound effects, and people programming the game programs (game software) according to the scenario of the game. Each person takes over its own portion of the work and all the portions of the work carried out by all of the people involved are eventually combined into one game software.
So far, however, a computer program for such a game has been created according to a method in which programmers having a high level of professional knowledge of computer programming techniques are creating the programs by including all the information such as pictures, their actions, effects sounds and so on, integrally into source programs, while making reference to the scenario of the game, the characters, the background images and so on drawn by designers and so on for use with the scenario of the game.
The source programs created in the manner as described hereinabove are then completed into a program for the game and can be executed as a game program by translating (compiling) them into a type executable on computers such as, for example, home game machines or personal computers or on an operating system or the like. At this stage, the program of the game can be confirmed for the first time as to whether it can run as intended by the programmers.
The computer game programs are created in the manner as described hereinabove proceeding with the programming by including the scenario of the game, the images (pictures) of the characters, the background images and so on to be employed in the scenario of the game, their actions, the effects sounds and so on integrally into the source programs. Therefore, the programmers cannot try to move, for example, the images (pictures) such as the characters and the background images to check whether they can move as the actual game software until the program has been completed.
Therefore, even if the planning is intended to be changed or modified during the creation of the game software or when the manner of execution of the game software is intended to be viewed at a certain stage of creating the game software, the execution of the game software cannot be implemented until the programs have been completed by the programmers. Further, once the program has been completed, the source program itself has to be changed or modified even if either of the scenario or the pictures such as the characters or the background images is intended to be changed or modified. Whenever such demands arise, the program has to be changed or modified, the type of execution has to be compiled into an executable type, and whether such changes or modifications can run as required has to be confirmed. As a matter of course, such work leads to a very poor efficiency in creating game software.
In addition, as only the actions of the images cannot be simulated separately from the execution of the scenario of the game, the game is planned and reviewed as to whether the images can run as intended by using plural sheets of paper on which pictures (picture scripts) are drawn. However, as the simulation on the paper may often be different from the actual actions by running the completed program, a series of the operations from the changes of the source program to the test execution of the program has to be performed whenever changes or modifications of the game are desired. This presents the problems that efficiency of development of the games becomes very low.
Furthermore, in order to create a game program, as the hardware, the operating systems, the programming languages and so on, on which the game program can run, vary with their manufactures, the programmers have to create the programs with the different programming language prepared in different ways by each of the manufactures in accordance with the different hardware specifications and so on. Therefore, the programmers have to be well acquainted with such different hardware specifications and programming language specifications for the game program and such things require the programmers to bear big burdens.